Manufacturers, retailers, and distributors must store and deliver great quantities of goods at a time. Many such users have hundreds if not thousands of products. Orders are received from customers and material handling systems must locate inventory and then route inventory necessary to fill the orders to an appropriate location for shipping or delivery. Through-put is a concern as sometimes many thousands of containers per hour must be processed through a single facility. Intelligent control systems have been developed to track customer orders, inventory, and the routing of the inventory necessary to fill the customer orders. Automation is a solution for reducing the amount of manual labor necessary to fill such orders, as manual labor tends to reduce reliability and through-put, and increases costs.
Individual container storage and delivery systems have been developed which are capable of storing multiple stock keeping units (SKUs) of different products and variations in products, such as size, color, quantity, and flavoring. Such systems mechanize the process of filling orders for multiple containers having different SKUs in an efficient and reliable manner. Such systems, however, can require a great deal of floor space and can be costly to install and use.
Grace, U.S. Pat. No. 4,621,745, discloses an individual container storage and delivery system (ICSDS) in which a vertically accumulating storage and retrieval system (VASRS) for containers is loaded at the top of a tower and selectively dispenses at the bottom. The tower has a frame that defines first and second tower sections, each supporting a number of vertically spaced shelf trays which in turn support the containers which are stacked on the trays when loaded. The shelf trays of each tower section face inwardly toward and are staggered relative to each other. Each tray is mounted for pivotal movement about a horizontal axis and is operated so that when a container is dispensed from a bottom shelf tray, each higher tray beginning at the bottom and progressing upward one at a time, pivots to transfer its carton to the upwardly tilted, next lower, empty shelf tray. This process is repeated until each container has been transferred to the next lower shelf tray. As a container is loaded at the top of the tower, the shelf trays are operated to pass the container downwardly in a zig-zag fashion from one tray to another until it reaches the highest unloaded shelf tray.
ICSDS systems such as vertically accumulating storage and dispensing apparatus provide an efficient methodology for delivering containers having many different SKUs. However, many customer orders require a few containers having different SKUs, and many containers having the same SKUs. That is, many customer orders require many containers of a few popular SKUs, and then various lesser amounts of containers of less popular SKUs. ICSDS systems deliver the containers typically under computer control to a conveyor system which conveys the containers to a palletizer. At the palletizer, the containers are placed onto a pallet layer-by-layer. It is a time consuming process to deliver individual containers to the palletizer, and to place these containers onto the pallet, even in a fully automated system.